What’s On around Ireland

Three of my sculptures selected for Eco Aware Art Gallery ® Art Gallery
Our Vision Is To Reduce Waste In world through Art. We promote Artwork Made by Waste ,Recycle , And Found Material.

https://visit.virtualartgallery.com/ecoawareartgallery

This gallery exhibition centers on the textile installation by artist Varvara Keidan Shavrova, born in Soviet Russia and now living in England and Ireland. The installation features eight screen-printed felt blankets, each depicting images from her family photo album. This social and performative artwork invites interaction: visitors are encouraged to touch the blankets or drape them over their shoulders.

Juxtaposed with the artwork are historical objects from the Documentation Centre’s collection, including a tablecloth from East Prussia, a bedspread from Bohemia, and a small table cover from Brandenburg.

Textiles such as blankets, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, traditional costumes, coats, cloaks, scarves, and throws are poignant witnesses to hardship and suffering. They serve as relics of loss and deprivation, embodying the deeply human desire to connect with warmth, familiarity, and family. These objects offer a sense of solace against the painful experiences of displacement, loneliness, and uprootedness.

Varvara Keidan Shavrova’s work speaks to these shared experiences of millions of refugees, displaced persons, and emigrants, resonating with their enduring stories.

Exhibition Dates: February 2- November 16, 2025

IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is a major three-year display celebrating IMMA’s Permanent Collection as a source of agency and knowledge. Featuring over 100 artists, from the 1960s to the present, it highlights key works, including many recent acquisitions. This ambitious exhibition invites engagement and research over time, allowing for a rich durational experience of Ireland’s Modern and Contemporary Art Collection.

Through thematic, chronological, geographical, and media-based approaches, the exhibition examines how artworks connect across time and contexts, fostering new interpretations and relevance. Works from the 1960s to the 1980s evoke the foundational story of the Irish art world. While acknowledging the context of the modernist, predominantly male dominance of that era, the exhibition also spotlights the material innovation and socially engaged practices of others who persisted despite the relatively conservative status quo.

The exhibition also presents more recent practice that explores urgent global themes such as gender, hybridity, cultural histories, de-colonialism, diaspora, migration, food injustice, climate, and ecological change. Memory, imagination, and storytelling play pivotal roles in these works, offering generative ways to process fragmentation, dislocation, and survival in unfamiliar spaces. New and existing works in the IMMA grounds will extend these themes.

The exhibition includes a specially created ‘white cube’ gallery space inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s renowned series of essays Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), that critiques the auratic, market-driven effects of the white cube gallery format. Likewise the choice of works curated for this space pushes back by highlighting works by Post-War American women, pioneering conceptualist artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Brian O’Doherty as well as a contemporary feminist response by Andrea Geyer.

By interweaving historical and contemporary narratives, Art as Agency invites audiences to reflect on the evolving meanings and possibilities of art in shaping our understanding of and action in the world.

Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend is a group exhibition featuring the work of African American women from a small Alabama community whose work have become symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride. This stunning collection of textile works celebrates African American culture and heritage.

28 Feb 2025–27 Oct 2025
Gallery 3

IMMA presents Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, the first exhibition of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers in Ireland, co-organised with Souls Grown Deep. The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a group of African American women from a small Alabama community with a 200-year tradition of quilt making, have created quilts that hold both artistic and political significance. Artistically, their work is renowned for its improvisational style, bold colours, and abstract designs, often compared to modernist art movements like abstract expressionism. Their quilts, made from recycled fabrics, are deeply rooted in African American textile traditions and showcase unique creativity in geometric patterns.

Politically, the quilts reflect resilience and self-sufficiency, as they were born out of necessity in an economically deprived, racially segregated region. The civil rights movement brought attention to these women, who became symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride. Their craft has been exhibited in museums worldwide, highlighting the importance of marginalised voices in American history. The quilts serve as both a celebration of African American heritage and a testament to the strength and creativity of women in the face of systemic oppression.

Through the public programme IMMA will explore parallels with the textile and quilt-making traditions in Ireland.

IMMA TALKS / Lecture & Launch
The Quilts of Gee’s Bend
Raina Lampkins-Fielder
Join Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation for a talk on the unique quilt making tradition of Gee’s Bend, a community of over five generations of Black American quiltmakers located on the banks of the Alabama River. This talk coincides with the launch of the exhibition Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.

Thurs 27 Feb 2025, 5pm – 6pm
Johnston Suite, IMMA
Booking required – Free

In 2025 Lismore Castle Arts will celebrate 20 years by presenting an exhibition dedicated to the theme of Kunstkammer, curated by art historian & writer, Robert O’Byrne.

Kunstkammer is a form of museum in which strange or rare objects are exhibited together, also known as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Once widespread throughout Europe, these private museums were renowned for featuring a broad range of objects, including Arteficialia (products of man) and Naturalia (products of nature) together with scientific instruments, clocks and automaton.

Priceless works of art were shown alongside strange curiosities, antiquities next to the latest inventions. They were united in their diversity, and their beauty. Kunstkammer at Lismore Castle is both a re-creation and a reinvention of the genre. Through a series of rooms, each one different in size and form, historical objects from private and public collections will share space with works by leading Irish and international contemporary artists.

The exhibition creates new encounters with the familiar and uncanny, inviting timely conversations about display, collections, and contemporary practice as the artefact of the future. Drawing on themes of display the work invites audiences to engage with contemporary art in an accessible way, referring to one of the original ambitions of the Cabinet of Curiosity to foster learning through encounter.

Robert O’Byrne is one of Ireland’s best known writers and lecturers specializing in the fine and decorative arts. A former Vice-President of the Irish Georgian Society, he is the author of more than a dozen books, a former columnist for Apollo magazine, and a contributor to both The Burlington Magazine and the Irish Arts Review. Robert has curated many exhibitions, including Ireland’s Fashion Radicals for The Little Museum in Dublin, and In Harmony with Nature: The Irish Country House Garden for the Irish Georgian Society, both of which drew record attendances. For the past twelve years, he has written an award-winning blog The Irish Aesthete.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events, talks, screenings, and a far-reaching learning programme. A catalogue will be published in Summer 2025 to accompany the exhibition.

Pallas Projects/Studios are delighted to announce the participating artists in our Arts Council funded programme of Artist-Initiated Projects 2025. The series of 8 x 3-week exhibitions between March–November 2025 will present exhibitions of new work by:

Cillian Finnerty, Michella Randilu Perera, Niamh Coffey, Reuben Brown, Lucy Andrews, Kathryn Maguire, Gary Farrelly, Caroline Mac Cathmaoil.

Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place between March and November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists’ talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.

Cillian Finnerty — March 27th – April 12th

Michella Randilu Perera — April 24th – May 10th

Niamh Coffey — May 22nd – June 7th

Reuben Brown — June 19th – 5th July

Lucy Andrews — July 17th – August 2nd

Kathryn Maguire — September 11th – 27th

Gary Farrelly — October 9th – 25th

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil — 6th – 22nd November

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Pallas Projects/Studios is one of Ireland’s longest running artist-run spaces, with a dedicated tradition over 28 years towards the professional development of artists in a peer-led, supportive environment, providing opportunities for emerging and mid-career artists to develop and exhibit new work. PP/S have established a nationwide and international reputation among artists and organisations, and a public profile through successful and critically engaged exhibitions, publishing, collaborations and partnerships, and education programmes for schools. Recent projects include the 4-year research project and publication ‘Artist-Run Europe’, published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven in 2016, and the annual ‘Periodical Review’ exhibition now in its thirteenth year.

Exhibition continues 25th March – 1st November 2025.

Jack Butler Yeats; The Dreaming Road
Tue. 25 Mar. – Sat. 1 Nov. 2025

The Dreaming Road presents audiences with the opportunity to trace Jack Butler Yeats’ extraordinary journey as an artist through four important, interconnected stages of his life and work. The show touches on the legacy of his unique artistic family, as well as the indelible influence of his early life in Sligo on his entire career. A selection of his politically charged paintings of the 1920s are on view alongside a number of the great masterpieces of his later years, which are noted for their wildly romantic and expressionistic style. While Jack was notably reluctant to discuss his creative practice, the exhibition is augmented with a number of statements by the artist himself that shed light on aspects of his attitudes and approaches to painting.

The Yeats Family was one of the most creative and accomplished in the literary and cultural world of early twentieth century Ireland. Patriarch, John Butler Yeats was distinguished as an artist, and particularly noted for his work in portraiture. Jack’s three siblings William, Susan, Elizabeth made significant contributions to literature, publishing and education throughout their lifetimes. Their mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy Sligo merchant family, and imbued in her children a deep love for the people, landscape, and mythology of the county.

Jack Butler Yeats remains one of Ireland’s best loved and most accomplished artists. Unlike his siblings, Jack was sent to his maternal grandparents in Sligo, where he lived between the ages of eight and 16 years. He cut his creative teeth on the deep experience of Irish life he encountered in the town, and its western characters and dramatic landscape populated his works until the end of his life. While his subject matter remained the same throughout his long career, his style of painting, and the meaning he gave his works changed over time. His initial depictions of western life was marked by a strong sentimentality, which he expressed in watercolours during the period 1898–1910. This gave way, in his early oil period (1910–1925), to the pronounced realism that he developed to make political and social commentary.

Jack had been on a visit back to Sligo in 1898, when he witnessed some of the centenary re-enactments of the 1798 Rebellion. The spectacle of the event appealed to Jack’s love of the drama of everyday life, and he was inspired to create one of his first political scenes, Robert Emmet – Procession at Carricknagat, Co. Sligo, 1898. The more serious concern of Ireland’s nationhood that the centenary celebrations brought to the fore, also impacted the young artist. From 1898 onwards he became more convinced of the right to Irish self-determination. He went on to paint several, more overtly political works, some of which are also on view in this exhibition, culminating in the masterworks The Funeral of Harry Boland, 1922, and Communicating with Prisoners, c. 1924.

From the 1920s and into the later part of his career, another more marked development took hold. Jack’s subject matter became imbued with a deeper mysticism and symbolism. His handling of paint became much freer, he abandoned his palette and brush, and worked directly onto the canvas using only the primary colours. Throughout the 1940s, his paintings increasingly present us with apocalyptic visions. He developed a highly personal technique, which placed less emphasis on composition. He focused more on creating work in a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style and termed the paintings he made in this way as ‘happenings’.

The exhibition continues until 1st November. In depth Curator’s Tours will run on each Saturday at 11am throughout June, July and August, and can be booked at the front desk or at www.themodel.ie.

We keep all of our exhibitions free of charge and open to everyone. We kindly ask that those who can afford to, make a donation of €5 for this exhibition. This can be done by contactless payment at the station in this gallery.

Entangled Life
Curated by Cristina Nicotra
May–December 2025

Entangled Life, supported by Community Foundation Ireland, is a programme exploring the deep connections between climate, society, and the ecosystems where art and community intertwine. This initiative unravels heterogeneous climate and social topics, by understanding ecology as a complex web of relationships—between humans, the more-than-human world, and political and natural environments.

Entangled Life aims to provide space to facilitate a network of relationships, collaboration and engagement within the community. Over the course of 8 months the project will bring together community participants, artists and experts – including Lisa Fitzsimons (Strategy and Sustainability Lead at Irish Museum of Modern Art), Eileen Hutton PhD (Head of Art and Ecology at Burren College of Art), and Gareth Kennedy (artist, lecturer and lead coordinator on NCAD FIELD) – for a series of monthly panel talks, workshops and artistic interventions at Pallas Projects, culminating in an exhibition in December 2025.

The project draws inspiration from Merlin Sheldrake’s book of the same name, which explores the interconnected mycelium worlds that allow for unexpected possibilities, and Joanna Macy’s principles of ‘Active Hope’, which emphasize knowledge, compassion and action. With the final goal of promoting a decarbonised future, the project explores the links between climate issues and society, and shows how they are relevant in our daily life and our community.

The events series will provide diverse perspectives and room for direct interaction among participants through a non-linear, non-hierarchical approach, fostering exploration and critical thinking, considering mental wellbeing. This multidisciplinary initiative feeds the need to provide opportunities for influencing and activating change effectively. It allows the community to learn about climate issues, react, and co-create diverse, dynamic and unpredictable connections and inspirations. Feedback and reactions collected throughout the programme will be compiled into a toolkit report.

In all, seven topics will be unravelled and discussed through open panel discussions, workshops beginning with The Art of Just Transition on Wednesday 14th of May, with Rachel Fallon, Artist; Dr Egle Gusciute, Assistant Professor in Sociology, UCD; and Michelle Murphy, Research & Policy Analyst with Social Justice Ireland and member of Just Transition Commission.

Events Schedule

14th May The Art of Just Transition (Talk)

11th June Discovering biomaterials in art and society (Talk)

9th July Art and biomaterials (Workshop)

3rd September Beyond Words: communicating sustainability (Talk)

1st October Intersectionality in art and climate (Talk)

29th October Climate and Art: programming & advocacy (Talk)

27th November Entangled Life (Exhibition opening)

3rd December Climate crisis and mental health (Workshops)

17th December Climate activism and socially engaged art (Talk)

Events take place Wednesdays, 6–8pm. Participants are welcome to attend some or all events. Places can be booked via Eventbrite, but there will be a places for walk-ins subject to availability

IMMA presents a solo exhibition by Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), one of the great innovators in post-war American painting, co-organised with the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Emerging in the mid-1960s, his canonical ‘Drape’ paintings merged painting, sculpture, and performance in conversation with architecture in entirely new ways. Suspending unstretched lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed.

Sewing Fields highlights Gilliam’s connection to Ireland, where a transformative residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in the 1990s reshaped his artistic practice. Gilliam embraced new materials, working with pre-stained fabrics that he had shipped to Ireland, cutting and layering them into sculptural compositions. A collaboration with a local dressmaker further expanded this process, reinforcing his innovative fusion of painting and textile techniques.

The dramatic, undulating forms in his work resonate with the vastness and wildness of the Irish coast, featuring loose, flowing compositions that reflect the organic and unpredictable nature of the land and sea. Gilliam’s signature vibrant colour fields were influenced by the unique Irish light, resulting in atmospheric, almost translucent hues. By moving away from the rigid geometry of modernism, Gilliam’s work in Ireland fostered an intuitive dialogue with the surrounding environment, celebrating the physicality of painting and the emotional resonance of place through abstraction and materiality.

This exhibition continues IMMA’s engagement with artists whose work has received renewed attention and accolades in recent years that has included Howardena Pindell (2023), Derek Jarman (2019), and Frank Bowling (2018).

‘Art in Motion’ Exhibition to Open at Baile Mhuire Day Centre.

Tralee Art Group is delighted to announce their latest collaborative exhibition, ‘Art in Motion’, which will be officially opened on Tuesday, June 17th at 2.30pm at Baile Mhuire Day Centre, Balloonagh, Tralee. The opening will be led by special guest Paddy Garvey, Chairperson of Baile Mhuire, and all are welcome to attend. Guests can enjoy an afternoon of art, music and refreshments in a warm and inclusive setting.

This special exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between members of Tralee Art Group and the clients of Baile Mhuire Day Centre, showcasing the creative energy and expression of both groups. Featuring a variety of works in different media, styles and subjects, Art in Motion celebrates movement, creativity, and community spirit.

TAG is committed to enriching the cultural life of Tralee and surrounding areas. The group regularly holds exhibitions, workshops, and community projects, and has built strong relationships with local organisations—including an ongoing volunteering partnership with Baile Mhuire.

This exhibition reflects that partnership, with art created not only by TAG members but also by clients of the Day Centre who engage weekly in creative workshops facilitated by the group volunteers from Tralee Art Group. The result is a joyful and inspiring collection of artworks, each piece telling its own story of imagination, connection, and collaboration.

All are welcome to attend the opening and celebrate this uplifting display of artistic expression in our community. The exhibition will run for a year and be available to the public weekdays between 4pm and 5pm.

The Great Book of Ireland is an extraordinary vellum manuscript which contains the original work of 120 artists, 140 poets and nine composers.

All of the contributors were asked one thing – please convey your hopes, joys, fears, loves in being an Irish person at the turn of the second millennium. Described by former president, Mary Robinson, as “the Book of Kells of the second millennium”, artists and writers who contributed include Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland, Cecily Brennan, Louis le Brocquy, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Seamus Heaney, Eithne Jordan, Michael Longley, John Montague, Tony O’Malley, Kathy Prendergast, and Patrick Scott.

Visitors will have the opportunity to view the original manuscript as well as to use a digital touchscreen to turn the pages and explore the exceptional range of artistic practices brought together in this unique cultural artefact.

Visitors will have the opportunity to view the original manuscript as well as to use a digital touchscreen to turn the pages and explore the exceptional range of artistic practices brought together in this unique cultural artefact.

The Great Book of Ireland is supported by The Arts Council Ireland, University College Cork, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.

Sara Flynn, Sueharu Fukami, Shihoko Fukumoto, Joe Hogan, Eiko Kishi, Frances Lambe, Deirdre McLoughlin, O’Donnell + Tuomey, Satoru Ozaki, Sean Scully, Joseph Walsh, Kan Yasuda, Osamu Yokoyama.

Curated by Wahei Aoyama and Joseph Walsh.

RINN explores the culture of making and its relationship to place and time through the work of Irish and Japanese artists and architects. While each piece is a personal expression of form, their works are united by an immersion in the culture of making. Whether drawing on craft heritage – the materials and skills associated with place – or challenging new techniques and pursing new materials, they all share an intimate relationship with the handmade.

Rinn in Gaelic means place or a point – and in Japanese, the same word means circle, ring or circularity. Joseph Walsh has observed that the meaning in both languages strongly represents ideas inherent in his practice, of place and this moment in time, within a continuous cycle of time.

Presented by Making In by Joseph Walsh Studio as part of the Ireland Japan 2025 programme in partnership with the Government of Ireland, the exhibition premiered in April at both Ireland House and A Lighthouse called Kanata, Tokyo.

The Glucksman is proud to host the show on its return to Ireland.

RINN is supported by The Arts Council Ireland, University College Cork, Government of Ireland, Ireland Japan 2025, A Lighthouse Called Kanata, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 9th August, 3.00 – 5.00pm. All Welcome.

Butler Gallery, in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival, is delighted to present an exhibition exploring the theme of ‘Cities of the World’ by two artists, Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach. The two have never met, but are intrinsically linked by this subject matter which they realise in very different ways.

Kathy Prendergast, an Irish London-based artist, is represented by her suite of 113 City Drawings which were begun in 1992. Owned by IMMA, they have not been exhibited in many years. Based on contemporary maps of the world’s capital cities, Prendergast compresses each city, large and small, and follows her own sense of scale to contain each city on the same size paper. Transcribing the network of lines with understated pencil marks she conveys the pattern of routes through, within and around each city, imposing an unfathomable sense of democracy on the world. The skeletal images reduce even the largest and most powerful communities to a delicate network of lines that resemble organic patterns in nature.

Chris Leach, a British Manchester-based artist, began his Capital Cities drawing project in 2012 and continued until 2022. He has completed 196 tiny drawings of every recognised capital city in the world which together functions as one piece of work. Leach’s miniature drawings are solidly three-dimensional, drawn with pencil, scalpel and burnishing tools on the gessoed face of an oak block. Leach is interested in how scale can be used as a tool for both psychological and representational investigation.

The cities work by Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach is a fascinating juxtaposition and prompts wider discussions around geography, architecture and politics—what cities say about us and what they don’t.

Additionally, a film programme ‘City as Character’ will highlight iconic cities in both mainstream and art house cinema. Co-curated by Butler Gallery and Out of Focus, films will be shown in the Digital Gallery and also in collaboration with the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

Anna O’Sullivan
Director & Exhibition Curator

Learning & Public Engagement Events:

Artists Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach in conversation with exhibition curator Anna O’Sullivan and Dr Yvonne Scott, Tuesday 12th August 2025 at 12.00pm, Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle. Free ticketed event, available to book on the Kilkenny Arts Festival website.

Dr Yvonne Scott is an Emeritus Fellow and former Associate Professor of History of Art at Trinity College Dublin.
She was awarded the RHA Gold Medal for 2025 in recognition of her services to Irish art. She has researched and published extensively in modern and contemporary art, including analysis of various aspects of the work of artist Kathy Prendergast. Her most recent book is Landscape and Environment in Contemporary Irish Art, published by Churchill House Press in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2023.

Image: (L) Kathy Prendergast, Mexico City from ‘City Drawings’, 1992, Pencil on Paper, 24 x 32cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase 1996, © Kathy Prendergast. (R) Chris Leach, Tallin, Estonia, Pencil, scalpel, burnishing tool, rabbit skin gesso on quarter sawn oak, 32 x 43mm (From Capital Cities series 2013-2023)

In To the Edge of Your World, Dutch-born, Ireland-based artist Anita Groener uses humble materials—twigs, cardboard, cut paper—to explore themes of loss, displacement, and resilience. Her intricately constructed sculptures and drawings reflect on the shared human impact of migration, conflict, and remembrance, shaped in part by her travels through the American South and global regions affected by upheaval. The exhibition also features the premiere of Shelter, a new animated video created in collaboration with filmmaker Matt Kresling and the Talbot Interfaith Shelter. Drawing from personal narratives, Shelter highlights stories of perseverance and community, echoing the exhibition’s meditation on belonging, memory, and the human capacity to endure.

This Exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland.

Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker.

Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.

Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker is an immersive exhibition that invites visitors to imagine the future of restful spaces and practices. Libraries of Rest combines installation, gameplay, sound and light, inhabiting a space between visual art, immersive environment and critical theory, centered on collective well-being.

Barker’s investigation of rest as a method of resistance is informed by a number of critical works, including texts by Tricia Hersey, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, Sonya Renee Taylor and Dr. Devon Price. This scholarship is grounded in its examination of structural inequality and rest as a racial, disability rights and social justice issue that disproportionately affects marginalised communities.

This exhibition is curated by Aoife Donnellan with a soundscape by Mankyy. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Photo by Katie O’Neill.

Diagonal Acts by Marie Farrington.

Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.

Diagonal Acts refers to how diagonal lines are seen as ways to connect, divide and move across various places or ideas. The exhibition explores themes of memory, place and connection — exploring gaps, fragments and edges within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged performance.

The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access.

This exhibition is curated by Kate Strain with contributions by Liliane Puthod and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Image: Marie Farrington, Figures for Lifting, 2024, carved soapstone. Photo by Rein Kooyman.

Exhibition continues from the 13th of June to the 4th of January 2026

An exhibition of rarely seen artworks by internationally important Japanese war photographer Akihiko Okamura, documenting his relationship with Ireland during the Troubles. 

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Japanese war photographer Akihiko Okamura (1929-1985) created a powerful and largely unseen collection of photographs in Ireland, both north and south. 

After covering the Vietnam War, Akihiko Okamura visited Ireland in 1968 drawn by the connection to John F. Kennedy’s family roots. A year later, he moved to Ireland with his own family and stayed until his sudden passing in 1985. During that time, he captured everyday life with his family and the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles.

Okamura’s photographs have rarely been seen before, and show a unique artistic view of Ireland at this time. What makes his work stand out is that he chose to make Ireland his home. Among all the international photographers working at that time, Okamura stood out for his commitment to the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Since he became so closely connected to what he was photographing, Okamura created innovative images in both his own style and how the Troubles were shown through photography. His profound, personal relationship with Ireland allowed him to develop a new method of documenting conflict: poetic and ethereal moments of peace in a time of war.

Akihiko Okamura: The Memories of Others is now open in Art Gallery 4, Ulster Museum. No booking needed. 

The Memories of Others is a Photo Museum Ireland touring exhibition. Curated by Pauline Vermare, Seán O’Hagan, Masako Toda, Brendan Maher and Trish Lambe, with the support of the Estate of Akihiko Okamura, it premiered at Photo Museum Ireland in 2024. It opened in Belfast during Belfast Photo Festival.

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Exhibition continues from 23rd August to 1st November 2025

A major solo exhibition by artist Maud Cotter maelstrom presents a group of works which seek to examine the complexity of the present, and engages with the complexity and form of change as process, with works that reference the dual directionality of time, and the relational nature of matter.

This exhibition of large scale works by this established Irish artist responds to the complexity and spatial range of the site of Highlanes Gallery across its two floors.

Integrated into the exhibition is a stream of engagement with the historic and contemporary work from the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection.

Within the exhibition of new and recent large-scale sculpture and installation is the eponymous work – maelstrom which Maud Cotter describes as ‘a spiral, a whirling stream.’

She adds ‘this phenomenon I see as an expression of the nature of change, a complex form which expands and ingests space; a dual directional dynamic, ingesting spent form and offering a different conceptual direction.’

Writer and critic Rebecca Geldard has written recently on Cotter’s practice:

‘In Marcel Marceau’s stage routine, there is a perfectly choreographed moment of suspension that goes unnoticed by the audience, Maud Cotter explains. It serves to amplify the physicality of his feat, the ability to hold sinew and bone in time and freeze imperceptibly. But this is only noticeable in the wings, from where she draws him. Beyond the stage, the interruption of energy, of flow, appears to change nothing but, in fact, changes everything about the energy field. With the muscular elegance of the gymnast or the pervasive creep of a musical score, the slight shift in mood silently alters the parameters of what’s performatively possible.’

‘Interconnectedness, at the molecular level, is the driver of Cotter’s sculptural enquiry; manifesting moments of “imperfect geometry” at the core of where things, beings, ideas and environments meet. Whether daring to ‘draw’ this massively in metal, manufacture it through the placement of pre-existing materials, or orchestrate the essential bits in between, any sense of artistic coercion is only ever, and oh so lightly, custodial, however hands-on the process. Each fixing, inscribed section, loop of archi-graphic script, is allowed to speak with its own energy as part of a quietly insistent ensemble cast, leading us beyond the need for meaning and on towards a collective sense of being in the thick of it – soaring, spiralling, feeling that all things seem to touch so they are.’

Ormston House in collaboration with EVA International presents Bíodh Orm Anocht. The exhibition will run from 29 August to 26 October.

Bíodh Orm Anocht, roughly translating to ‘be with me tonight’, is a group exhibition featuring new and existing artworks by four artists – Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole – presented at Ormston House and off-site locations. While the contributors work across media and processes, they are unified by a preoccupation with customs and practices that can broadly be described as folk knowledge. These methods and intuitive systems challenge technorational systems of thought.

These four artists convey knowledge that transcends language and which is all the more potent because it remains unwritten and unspoken. Each artist is concerned with the metaphorical qualities of materials. They draw from disciplines outside the visual arts (including mythology, zoology, and cartography), infusing them with personal meaning. Inherent in these works is the possibility that atavistic wisdom may be sourced from the natural world.

Seán Hannan‘s work explores how forgotten voices and rituals can echo into the future, both through unstable technologies and systems of collaboration. Using archival fragments from autobiographical memories referring to Irish traditions, Hannan’s artworks reflect obsolescence and poetic instability. Received at the Graveyard is a sonic installation revolving around an evolving voice AI (artificial intelligence). At its core lies a handful of field recordings made in Ireland in the 1950s that captured the final traces of a near-extinct tradition, keening (caoineadh). Another work featured in this exhibition is LUCK (2022), a sculpture in the form of a piseóg (pish-ohg): folk witchcraft. Mainly a phenomenon of rural Ireland, piseógs were cast as an act of malice, often using a chicken egg onto which a curse had been placed.

In contrast, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín employs materials which have traditionally been connected with healing and nourishment. Sifting stories and traces associated with site, memory, and the casting of spells, Ní Fhlaibhín creates complex but delicate sculptural scenarios. She frequently introduces living beings into white cube environments that are typically purposed for the display of inanimate objects. While previous artworks have involved earthworms, leopard slugs, and willow trees, the family of sculptural assemblages presented here are made from chunks of mineral salt and ash wood. The creation of these sculptures has involved the co-authorship of horses, who have licked the salt crystals into biomorphic forms. The ash tree is sacred in Irish mythology and is seen as possessing talismanic power.

The equine kingdom is also referred to in the cosmological work of Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh. His Speculative massage tools for a family of Donkeys (2022) incorporates massage tools for these domesticated creatures. Other works by Ó Dochartaigh presented at Ormston House include a rendering in glazed ceramics of the artist’s late father’s stomach. A stacked edition of printed drawings link the ecological decline of fish species with medical modifications of the human body, Irish history, and the legacies of British colonialism.

Preparation for this project has entailed site visits and open-ended fieldwork across graveyards, the River Shannon, fish shops, and city streets. This is best exemplified in the work of Kiera O’Toole, whose practice involves derivés of everyday public spaces, in this case Limerick city centre. Through drawing in-situ, O’Toole records the subtle energies of these locations (which she describes as spatialised emotions) and translates her pre-reflective, sensory encounters into topographical maps and charts that she describes as ‘affective cartographies’.

The exhibition takes its name from a traditional Irish song first transcribed by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1936. The song is essentially a piece of mouth music or lilting in which melody and rhythm take precedence over lyrical content. Before being preserved via the written word, ‘Bíodh Orm Anocht’ was conveyed orally down through generations and was therefore altered over time. In the few recordings that are available (such as Mick Hanly and Micheál O Domhnaill’s 1974 album Celtic Folkweave), the singer’s words hover between possibilities of lyrical meaning, pitch, and rhythm. In this way, the song is a vehicle for forms of expression that transcend time and language and which are an outcome of communal rather than individual authorship.

This exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events:

-On Saturday, 30 August from 12–1pm, Seán Hannan will join us for an artist talk and a wireless broadcast of Received at the Graveyeard. Meet at Ormston House, followed by a five-minute walk to St. Michael’s Graveyard. This event will have limited accessibility due to steps and uneven ground.
-On Friday, 19 September, we will be joined from 5–6pm by Historian-in-Residence Sharon Slater for a talk and walk about the history of St. Michael’s Graveyard. This talk will have limited accessibility due to steps and uneven ground. The exhibition will also remain open until 9pm as part of Culture Night 2025.
-On Friday, 26 September, 6–8pm, we will be joined for an artist talk with Laura NíFhlaibhín and tactile workshop with equine therapist Muriel Foxton. Free tickets can be booked here.
-On Saturday, 27 September from 2–4pm, artist Kiera O’Toole will lead a participatory drawing workshop. Through gestural drawing exercises, participants will map the energies and atmospheres of Limerick city. Meet at Ormston House, followed by a walk to city centre sites. Materials will be provided. Capacity is limited, so book here to avoid disappointment.

Artist biographies:

Seán Hannan lives and works in Amsterdam and graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam in 2009. His work has been shown in numerous art venues such as the RU exhibition space, New York; Upstream gallery, Amsterdam; and Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn. Hannan participated in Unfair16. He has also received numerous project grants from the Amsterdam fund for the arts (AFK).

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is an artist from Wexford. She completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 with Distinction and her BA at National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2013. She is the recipient of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin Staff Prize Bursary; the Goldsmiths Graduate Almacantar Bursary 2019; the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020; the Arts Council England Developing Creative Practice Award 2021; and Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries.

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh is an artist, researcher, and Gaeilgeoir from Derry, living and working with chronic illness. His mixed-media practice explores complexities inherent within the embodiment of personal loss with the legacy of political violence and lived experience. He is interested in combining industrial manufacturing processes with the materialities of artisanal craft objects to create a specific language of sculptural works.

Kiera O’Toole is a research-based visual artist and lecturer at ATU Sligo. Her practice explores drawing as a method of registering the spatialised emotions of place, blending phenomenology and atmospheric theory. O’Toole exhibits internationally and publishes widely on contemporary drawing. She is a professional member of Visual Artists Ireland and the Drawing Research Network (UK), and she is a co-founder of Drawing deCentered. She currently lives and works in Sligo, Ireland.

The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Limerick Arts Office. The events programme is funded by Creative Ireland and Limerick City and County Council through Limerick Creative Communities Small Grants Scheme 2025. Seán Hannan’s participation in this exhibition is partly made possible by the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage in the Netherlands.

Page Turners is an exhibition of artists’ books which launches in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral at 5:30pm on Thursday, September 4th.
This autumn exhibition in the cathedral ambulatory invites visitors to linger and spend time exploring selected artists’ books from across Ireland, the UK and France.
Selected national and international book artists include Ambeck Design, Coracle Press, Helen Douglas, Paul Gaffney, Helena Grimes, ottoGraphic Books, Road Books, and Tom Sowden. Editions will be for sale through the cathedral shop.

Page-turners is co-curated with MTU Crawford College of Art & Design and is an important moment at the cathedral as we pioneer a rolling arts programme.

There will also be a panel discussion at the cathedral at 12:30pm on Thursday, September 18th.
The exhibition runs until October 31st, 2025

There no charge to see this exhibition: email arts@stfinbarres.ie to receive your ticket.

The Office of Public Works and Dublin City Arts Office are pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Eithne Jordan RHA curated by Margarita Cappock. It takes place at the Casino Marino, Cherrymount Crescent, Marino, Dublin 3, D03 HH70.

The exhibition is open everyday from 10.00am to 5.00pm and admission to the exhibition is free.

About the Artist
Eithne Jordan is one of Ireland’s pre-eminent painters. In this exhibition, Jordan has turned her artistic gaze to the interiors of public and private spaces, such as museums and institutional buildings, which she has visited on her travels in Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. Jordan explores the way paintings, sculptures and artefacts are displayed in these spaces. She creates paintings that are, in her words, ‘emotional landscapes’. Jordan is drawn to exhibiting in unusual spaces where her work can interact with their surroundings as in this exhibition at the Casino Marino. Her paintings reflect her enduring interest in architecture and the interplay that can happen between her paintings and their environment, whether a modernist space or a historic building.

The resonance of this new body of work – most from the last five years – displayed in the rooms of the Casino creates the ‘echo’ of an ongoing conversation with the eighteenth century, which is why the artist chose this as the exhibition title. Eithne Jordan grew up in Clontarf, not far from the Casino. She states, ‘The Casino has an air of grandeur but it also has that sense of intimacy in the beauty of its proportions. It is one of the things that I love about it.’

Funded by the OPW and Dublin City Arts Office with the support of the Arts Council.

OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST, CURATOR MEET-AND-GREET, FILM SCREENINGS, AND MORE

“It’s terrible to think [about] where I get my inspiration, but all these things are fodder to me as an artist. I love trees. I love mountains. But I don’t want to go out and paint them. I don’t paint to make money. I paint what I want, and I’ve always been political.”

— Patricia Hurl

For the past 40+ years, the painter Patricia Hurl has portrayed the lives of Irish women and their experiences as housewives, child-bearers, caretakers, providers and warriors navigating a male-dominated world, evoking the broad spectrum of emotions felt by her subjects through expressionistic, layered brushstrokes and blending the figurative and abstract.

As part of Irish Gothic, a retrospective of Hurl’s extraordinary career presented by IAC in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), we will be offering special opportunities this September for audiences to engage with the artist and her work, including an opening night reception; a talk with curator Johanne Mullan of IMMA; a members-only private tour of the exhibition; screenings of the documentary Dawn to Dusk, which follows the artist collective Na Cailleacha, of which Hurl is a founding member; and gallery hours for an Irish Gothic theatre installation. Admission is free.

‘first-person’ a solo exhibition by Isabel English opens at LHQ Gallery, 5th of September 6pm.

Isabel English, from Ballyhea in County Cork, is a visual artist and educator based in Dublin. Isabel’s work utilises the mediums of photography, textile and sculpture, to extend from the literary genre of autofiction, which combines autobiographical truths with fictionalised renderings, to create contextually sensitive installations.
In ‘first-person’, Isabel uses images of bodily anatomy, taken from A Manual of Artistic Anatomy by John C.L. Sparkes (London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1888) as a source for the work. These images have been spliced and rendered beyond recognition and presented to the viewer as enlarged scans on assorted sheets of acetate. These actions are reflected in a number of wall based sculptural pieces made from disposable patterned aluminium plating, replicating the composition of honeycomb cardboard, generally used as protective packaging in the shipment and transportation of goods. These processes of repetition, which underline much of English’s practice, refers to the psychological concept of Repetition Compulsion, as underlined by Freud in his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ first published in German in 1920, as an unconscious tendency to repeat patterns of behaviour.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication produced by Isabel in which Cork based arts writer Sarah Long, and poet Julie Morrisey have written about Isabel’s work.
Isabel was awarded the inaugural Emerging Visual Artist Award from Cork County Council in 2024. Isabel was awarded the inaugural Emerging Visual Artist Award from Cork County Council in 2024. This award provides a bursary and the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at LHQ Gallery.

The exhibition runs from Friday 5th of September to Friday 24th of October.
Opening Hours: LHQ Gallery is open Monday to Friday 9.00am to 5.30pm, and closes on bank holidays.
Location: LHQ Gallery is in the County Library building on Carrigrohane Road, Cork, T12K335.

Curated by Francis Halsall and Belinda Quirke

Of Peras and Apeiron is a group exhibition of artists who explore systematic processes as an inherent part of their practice. Halsall and Quirke have curated a selection of work that explores the different numerical, geometrical and methodical systems that can be used to make art. They have found artists who both explore the potential of the infinite and unbounded (Aperion) whilst acknowledging they will always be bound by limits (Peras). The resulting work reveals approaches that are mathematical and rational, fictional and personal whilst exploring the deep creativity of systems made by humans and other agents.

Gerard Caris (Nederlands) devoted his arts practice to endless applications of what he termed pentagonism in drawing, print and sculpture.

Channa Horwitz’s (US) extraordinary system of notation, Sonakinatography embeds colour, sound and motion into unparalleled logic scores. Working methodically on common US graph paper with eight squares to the inch, Horwitz’s Sonakinatography allows the artist to “see time visually”, and create a universal notational language for creative interpretation.

Roy Johnston’s (NI) work of the late sixties to early eighties, employs rigorous Pythagorean rationalism and colour permutation both in sculptural form and 2D relief. Neil Clements (NI/Scotland) sets the year 1968 as a control method in deference to Johnston’s “Systems”. Facsimiles of abstract paintings characterised as peripheral to central art historical narratives are recreated by the artist in tread plate. Ronnie Hughes (IRE) memetic paintings thwart mathematical exactitudes through symmetrical slippages that optically and somatically perplex the viewer.

The grid is often referenced in Grace McMurray’s (NI) practice as both a tool, and framing device to the quiet, hidden fabrication of gendered labour. McMurray uses drawing, patchwork, knitting, and weaving within their work, seeking succor in memetic, geometric construction of handcrafted textiles.

Possible Utopian futures are explored in both Dannielle Tegeder’s (US) and Suzanne Treister’s (UK) practice. Tegeder summons the cosmological and the spiritual by means of invented sigils within fabricated urban schematics, whilst Treister’s multi-planetary, fictional persona, and tech futurism frequently allude to the Kabbalistic gematria and mystic systems.

Exhibition Opening: Friday 5th September at 6pm, all welcome

A bent knee at a vaguely familiar stranger
Another known face driving a taxi,
An accent switch when new friends appear
– only to be switched once more when they leave,
Ori on forehead

This series of collages explores how class and race affect how people move through the world, the jobs taken, spaces occupied. Reflecting on the lives of the Nigerian diaspora living in Ireland these works display the oddities of finding a home in a ‘foreign’ land while maintaining, engaging in and creating culture. Family Trees hang over Property Lines showcases the small encounters, subtle gestures and interactions that are kin to Black and Irish people.

Fiyin Oluokun is recipient of the 2024 ‘Emerging Visual Artist Bursary Award’ supported by Kildare County Council Arts Service and Riverbank Arts Centre.

McKenna Gallery
Friday 5 September-Saturday 25 October
Monday-Friday 9:30am-5pm | Saturday 10am-4pm
Admission Free

Grief’s Current Shape – a new thread based exhibition by Ciara O’Connor
“If I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable.”
-Edna O’Brien

Grief has seeped into my bones and I suspect it will never leave. But it is so much more than sorrow and despair. It is an ever changing expression of love. We loved them and they loved us. For me, sometimes that love is a rush of warmth when I look down at my hands and see hers.

Sometimes it’s a stab of regret for the hurtful thing I said to him. Sometimes it’s a crumble to the floor when I am overcome by the loss and cruelty of it all. But sometimes now, as the waves of sadness move further and further apart, it is bountiful gratitude for everything it has taught me.

Grief’s Current Shape is an exploration of the various stages of grief, and a personal attempt to lean into it all.

About Ciara
Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry based visual artist who works primarily with textiles and free motion embroidery. Her work is figurative and deals with themes of identity, feminism, trauma and recovery. She is interested in pushing the boundaries of traditional techniques to tell contemporary stories.

Since returning to her practice in 2019 she has been selected for 15 group shows, including Following Threads in Crawford Art Gallery, and RUA and RSA Annuals. She had her first solo show in Garter Lane Arts Centre, 2022, and has featured in FAIRE, Image Magazine, The Irish Examiner, The Kerryman, and VAN Jan/Feb 2024. Her second solo show opens from Sept 6 in Garter Lane Arts Centre.

Exhibition continues from the 4th of September to the 31st of October 2025

In her exhibition, open for Late Night Art Belfast this Thursday 4 September, Alexander interprets Aristotle’s imagining the cosmos as 56 celestial spheres by creating a series of acrylic sketches on linen. Each fragment invites a shift in perspective, exploring in-between spaces, identity beyond the body, and our place in the universe – a constellation of moments that ask who we are, and how we find meaning.

Jennifer Alexander is a visual artist and curator from Scotland, currently based in Northern Ireland. Her practice investigates the interplay between perception and stratification.

Exhibition continues from the 6th of September to the 1st of November 2025

The point of departure for this exhibition was Mandy O’Neill’s recent practice-based PhD, where she examined the social and material implications of housing development and dereliction in the Dublin inner suburb of Cabra. Her research questioned the ideological shifts in housing policy since the mid 20th century in Ireland which have resulted in a move from housing as public good to housing as commodity, with emphasis on the impact of planning. In a broader context O’Neill’s practice is concerned with the politics of space and place, and the power relations which shape our built environment

Exhibition continues from the 6th of September to the 1st of November 2025

Rooted in the beauty of the west of Ireland, The Push and Pull explores the dualities of motherhood – the tenderness and tension, the giving and the grieving, the fierce love and quiet loss of self. Through a series of intimate, textured works, the artist captures the emotional rhythms of raising children: moments of connection stretched thin by the demands of care, identity, and time. This body of work invites viewers into the ebb and flow of maternal experience, where nature, body, and memory collide.

New Life, Old Buildings is IAF’s national programme about the future of buildings that are already built.

11 Sept, 12:30-8pm, Wickham Way, Limerick
– Walking tour | Never Look Back
– Open table discussion | Places for Arts and Culture
– Site visits
– Panel | From Rubble to Regret: The Consequences of Demolition

18 Sept, 12:30-8pm, Wickham Way, Limerick
– Walking tour
– Open table discussion | Places for Social Inclusion and Community Development
– Site visits
– Panel | Storeys Retold: Heritage for the Future

23 Oct, 1pm
– Webinar | Look at the City

24 Oct, 1pm
– Webinar | Creating Space

In this installation of large-scale colourful oil paintings, sculptures and plexiglass mirrors Karen Ebbs explores ideas relating to reflection, perception and reality. At the heart of the work is colour, life-affirming and transformative. In a time of ecological and social challenge, Ebbs uses colour as a quiet rebellion against grey apathy to offer hope. Using mirrors, the boundaries between the artworks and the individual collapse. Viewers are confronted with their own reflections as they become interwoven with the artworks. Through this interaction visitors become part of an ever-changing installation which is continuously altered by their presence. This idea challenges the notion of separation and how we perceive ourselves, offering viewers an opportunity to pause.

Karen Ebbs is a Dublin-based artist and a member of Pallas Projects and Studios. She received a Masters in Fine Art, in painting from NCAD in 2023 and was subsequently shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards. She also studied at the Royal Hibernian Academy School, Dublin. Recent solo exhibitions include Rathfarnham Castle, 2024, Farmleigh Estate, 2022 and the LAB Gallery, Dublin, 2022. In 2022, Karen received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and a Professional Development Award from dlr Arts Office.
Our Gallery Learning Programme has lots of workshops, tours for all ages and opportunities to learn more and try different artmaking techniques. See our website for information: www.dlrcoco.ie/arts.

The form of photographic practice has expanded in recent times and the RHA invited artists to respond to the spatial magnitude of the largest gallery in Ireland, with many responding to the open spaces with in-the-round works to create something beyond the typical photo show. Pictured here is: the prosaic everyday made poetic; reflections on both psychic and human-altered landscapes; art documentary; constructed abstractions; observations on borders, invisible and hidden; meditations on sexuality and objectification; the interconnectedness of nature and reflections on Ireland losing its welcoming spirit. Throughout it all, a collage of Irish cultural identity—and our contemporary photographers’ place within it—is revealed.

This exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the RHA’s exhibition department and the artist-led group Island Photographers, who foster engagement with and understanding of photography in Ireland, both in the fine art realm and the broader lens-based culture industry through talks, events and workshops. All eight members are participating in the show.

Laura McMorrow’s paintings draw on found imagery of figures working in the garden, altered landscapes (topiary and hedging), plants, and people enjoying gardens and green spaces.
McMorrow learned everything she knows about gardening from her mother Gillian. An avid gardener and obsessive weeder, Gillian tended to her garden in North Leitrim by making decisions about which plants belong and deserve to self-seed and which become a nuisance. Her approach to gardening was naturalistic and looked effortless, but she was extremely dedicated to her craft.

Out in the garden, in all weather until dusk, it became a form of therapy for her as she suffered with a chronic and fatal illness. The garden became a sanctuary for Gillian and a source of inspiration for Laura who began researching and making work about gardens in her studio practice. Poet and gardener Ross Gay describes time spent gardening as “an exercise in supreme attentiveness”, a trait it shares with painting.

A stop motion animation created using a paint on glass technique is exhibited alongside the paintings. Each frame is hand painted, giving it a painterly and expressive aesthetic. The animation illustrates a quote by the filmmaker Derek Jarman in the book Modern Nature, a journal of his time spent gardening in Dungeness shortly after he discovered he was HIV positive.

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer. Derek Jarman.

McMorrow is interested in a personal exploration of the garden as a sanctuary and a space of refuge. However, she is also questioning the complexity of gardening in a time of climate emergency and the futile act of attempting to control and tame nature. The transition to a more ecologically friendly approach to gardening, for example, growing a wildflower meadow instead of a lawn. McMorrow embraces this duality of gardening as a form of therapy and its disposition in the greater context of our time.

Laura McMorrow is a visual artist from Leitrim. She holds a Masters in Fine art from the University of Ulster in Belfast (2012) and she graduated with a degree in painting from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008). Her practice incorporates video installation, animation, sculpture, collage, and painting.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Gardener Digs at The Dock and The Lost Acre at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Recent community art projects include a collaborative animation project with teenagers funded by Creative Ireland and a sensory mapping project with Leitrim Cycling Festival.
McMorrow is part of the collective, who run an artist-led studio and experimental space in Manorhamilton, Leitrim. Her studio is currently based in the collective space. In 2023, the collective worked together on a collaborative project called Waking the Land that considered environmental grief, supported by the Irish Hospice Foundation.

All works in the exhibition, The Known and Unknown World, have taken a drawing of a five-legged cat by George McCutcheon as their initial point of reference. This work, made in 1996 remains the logo of KCAT to this day. This unusual creature exists at the centre of a sprawling exhibition that mirrors the multi-layered design of a Wunderkammer.

From the 16th century onwards these cabinets of curiosities mixed items from the arts, the natural world, and the sciences to present idiosyncratic views of existence. Juxtaposing local landmarks with fantastical landscapes, common songbirds with speculatively designed creatures, human portraits with extra-planetary beings, The Known and Unknown World invites the viewer to discover and celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which the world can be experienced, understood, and recorded.

Artists featured in this exhibition include: Andrew Pike, Brianna Hurley, Declan Byrne, Diana Chambers, Erin Hacking, Eileen Mulrooney, Fergus Fitzgerald, Fintin Kelly, Jason Turner, Karl Fitzgerald, Lorna Corrigan, Margaret Walker, Shay Croke, Sinead Fahey, Thomas Barron, Mary Cody, Francis Casey, Jack Foskin and George McCutcheon.

Curated by Benjamin Stafford in cooperation with KCAT Studio. This exhibition was first shown at KCAT Art Centre, Callan, Co. Kilkenny as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 2025.

Marianne Keating’s upcoming exhibition brings together two new films that interrogate Ireland’s shifting place within histories of nationalism, migration, and global power. Cad Leis a Bhfuilimíd Ailínithe / To What Do We Align (2025) is a multi-channel film that reflects on Éamon de Valera’s idealised vision of Ireland, its economic stagnation and mass emigration, and the country’s subsequent reorientation under Seán Lemass, as Ireland chose to align itself with Western hegemony rather than the newly formed Non-Aligned Movement.

No Irish Need Apply (2025) examines the experience of the Irish in Britain during the 1970s and 80s, a period when political violence in Northern Ireland fuelled systemic discrimination, surveillance, and social prejudice against Irish communities. Together, these works explore how Ireland has been both the subject of, and complicit in, wider histories of colonialism, migration, and exclusion, revealing the contradictions at the heart of national identity

Marianne Keating is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. She holds a practice-based PhD in Visual & Material Culture and Contemporary Art Practice entitled, ‘They don’t do much in the cane-hole way’, Hidden Histories of the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica, funded by KSA at Kingston University, London and a TECHNE Associate. She has an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London and a BA in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London (2020- Present).

Keating was shortlisted to represent Ireland in the 2022 Venice Biennial and has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and internationally. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include (2025)The Irish Pavilion, World Expo, Japan; The Model, Sligo; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Ireland. Collections include The Office of Public Works, Ireland; Royal College of Art, London; Norlinda and José Lima Collection, Portugal; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Georgia, USA; Palazzo Fogazzaro, Vicenza, Italy.

Golden Thread Gallery is proud to present Radical Hope, a new exhibition developed in collaboration with Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Poland. Curated from Collection II, one of Poland’s most significant collections of contemporary art, the exhibition offers a timely reflection on uncertainty, resilience, and the transformative potential of art.

Collection II, held by the Arsenal Gallery and shaped under the direction of Monika Szewczyk, traces the evolving landscape of contemporary art in Poland and Eastern Europe over the past three decades. Developed as an ‘open corpus,’ the collection is a living archive: dynamic, growing, and responsive to the shifting narratives of our time.

This exhibition is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, British Council and Polish Cultural Institute in London, and supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.

Exhibition continues from the 13th of September to the 8th of November 2025

Golden Thread Gallery is proud to present Radical Hope, a new exhibition developed in collaboration with Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Poland. Curated from Collection II, one of Poland’s most significant collections of contemporary art, the exhibition offers a timely reflection on uncertainty, resilience, and the transformative potential of art.

Exhibition Launch: Saturday 13th September at 12 noon

Based in Sligo, Lorna Watkins is a multi-disciplinary visual artist. She studied Printed Textile Design in NCAD and is a recipient of a Ballinglen Fellowship. Her exhibition Tend/er features painting, printmaking and sculpture exploring ideas around the home, overlooked everyday objects, motherhood and ageing. She often references the body, as life drawing has been a constant in her practice over the past decade.

In 2024 Watkins was selected for the John Richardson French Residency Award and in 2020, JOYA AiR, Spain. She is a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award; ADI Training Award and Thomas Damann Travel Bursary and her works are part of several public and private collections including the Ulster Hospital and Ballinglen Arts Foundation.

Jason McCarthy’s personal ode to Drogheda, his hometown, encompasses everyday urban spaces, housing, streets, forgotten corners,
dereliction, the post-industrial, and the edge lands where the urban gradually gives way to the rural and the ebb and flow of the
majestic river Boyne.

McCarthy’s striking portraits are of the people who inhabit these places. All are looking directly at the camera and hence at the
viewer, each person confident in their body language, presentation, and individuality.

Hometown speaks of rootedness, belonging, and connection. Of being shaped by a place and also being intrinsic to shaping it.
McCarthy’s photographs are imbued with insight, quietness, and stillness that give a particular perspective on his hometown and
encourage us to look more deeply at our own home places.

Liminal Landscapes is a two-person exhibition featuring painter Gabhann Dunne and sculptor/writer Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe. Exploring transitions from ecological change to the boundaries of sculpture and writing, Dunne’s paintings respond to the Burren’s ecological narratives and the resilience of the Burren Pines. Hynan-Ratcliffe’s sculptural and written works engage with materiality, feminist perspectives, and cycles of grief and renewal. Together, their practices create a dialogue across nature, identity, and time, inviting reflection on our impact and connection to the earth

Let’s Not Talk About This Now is a solo exhibition of drawings, sculptures, and prints by Peter Nash at Cork Printmakers Studio Gallery which opens on Culture Night. 

Taking the form of an exploded encyclopedia, or chaotic museum exhibit, his visual explorations are open-ended and inherently human; a continuous search for understanding in a rapidly evolving digital age.

Whilst the exhibition aesthetic is influenced by museums and reference books, there are no claims to authority being made. There are deliberately more questions posed than answers presented.

Artist Talk 8 October 1pm

THE SWALLOW, Tadhg O’Sullivan’s new feature, starring Academy Award winner Brenda Fricker, will open in select Irish cinemas from 19 September.
The film presents a meditation on art, memory and solitude in later life, through an artist exploring memories and fragments of the past while trying to make sense of her own unwillingness to let go.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/marmaladefilms/theswallowofficialtrailer

Tickets available via https://linktr.ee/marmaladefilms

The Swallow was funded by The Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealaíon, under the Authored Works scheme.

Exhibition continues from the 19th of September to the 24th of October 2025

Presented by the Crespo Foundation and Goethe-Institut Irland, and curated by Ben Livne Weitzman, this exhibition brings together the work of two artist groups and former artists in residence in Glenkeen Garden, West Cork: Through two installations and an accompanying book, the artists take us on a journey to the transitional zones surrounding Glenkeen Garden, reflecting on time preserved in the bogs of the Irish landscape, and the ever-shifting rhythms and forms of the coastline.

Transitional Terrains is the fifth exhibition in The Glenkeen Variations series.

Flaxen is a collection of new works by Alice Fox, exploring the flax plant at every stage: from whole dried stems to unspun fibre. The works are woven or otherwise constructed to highlight the plant’s strength and delicacy, resulting in textured, structural pieces across different scales. Opening Reception and a chance to meet the artist: Saturday 27 September, 2–4pm, all welcome

The exhibition will include an online artist talk on 14 October 2025 at 6pm (book via eventbrite)

Gallery Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm

Pollanroe Burn or An Pollán Rua – the little red pool – unfolds through a series of new films and archival fragments, forming part of artist Emily McFarland’s ongoing long-term research into the shifting ecology of the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, in the North of Ireland, in the shadow of proposed major industrial-scale gold extraction. The project asks: How can we cultivate modes of thinking that allow intellect and empathy to apprehend the long-standing and delicate connections between humans and their environments?

Launching: Saturday 27 September 2025 at Void Art Centre, 6-8pm

Night Study presents a unique collection of artefacts collected from over a decade of artistic exploration and experimentation by artist and educator Glenn Loughran. The works on display serve as traces of events of enquiry, a diverse constellation of things that have mediated practices, from artistic research to critical pedagogy to social engagement.

The opening event will be a Gallery Conversation between the artist Glenn Loughran and historian and philosopher of art, Prof. Thierry de Duve on Saturday 27 October at 3.00pm.

Up There, for Space Week, and from 27th September – 25th October 2025, at MTU Blackrock Castle Observatory, Marie Bryan explores elements of scale and dimension, undescribed and unfathomable, using her vivid imagination. She seeks new ground. Her aspiration to adventure and to the magical lead her to paint a ‘parallel’ with astrophysics, and she now finds herself artistically inspired, Up There, investigating dark matter. High-octane colour is how she sees it.
Opening Reception 7pm Monday 29th September. Artist Talk 6pm Saturday 11th October.
Marie Bryan is a student of Fine Art at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. Her collection of portraits of residents of Cork Simon Community, “Pleased to meet you”, was exhibited at Cork Airport in November 2023, and in eight Cork City Libraries from June 2024 to March 2025. Her solo exhibition “Shadow Side and the Artist’s Escape” was hosted at MTU Cork School of Music, January – February 2025. She was contracted by the Irish Defence Forces to paint for the Irish Navy, June – August 2025.

VISUAL is pleased to present Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. This landmark touring exhibition has been conceived by Hettie Judah in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring. Following a successful tour of the UK, Acts of Creation comes to VISUAL augmented by the inclusion of works from Irish artists and collections.

Spanning all of VISUAL’s galleries, Acts of Creation presents work in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography and sound that speaks to the experience of motherhood in all its complexity. At VISUAL, an accompanying in-depth learning programme will respond to the exhibition’s themes and works. A reading area, a reflection space and specialist workshops and tours will further provide visitors with ways to engage with the ideas and experiences reflected in this powerful exhibition.

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood plunges into the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s to the present day.
While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about real motherhood, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation addresses this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important cultural figure.
How does the image of motherhood change when the artist is drawing on lived experience? What is made visible? What challenges are levelled at motherhood as an institution through which the mother is idealised as self-sacrificing, wholesome, tireless and uncomplaining?
Diverse experiences are explored across four thematic displays. Creation looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing. It imagines motherhood as a creative act, albeit one in which joy might be tempered with anxiety, pain and exhaustion.
Maintenance is dedicated to the ongoing work of motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day. Here we find artists engaged in domestic chores, keeping children safe, and navigating a balance between art and parenting.
In Loss artists reflect on experiences of miscarriage, adoption and involuntary childlessness. Works in this section also protest the loss of women’s reproductive rights.
The Temple is a series of self-portraits in which artists explore their own identity in relation to motherhood. For decades women were told they could not be both an artist and a mother. These portraits stand in defiance of that idea.

This exhibition features artworks that include nudity and explore childbirth, (in)fertility, miscarriage, abortion, loss and domestic abuse.

Exhibition continues 27 September – 22 November 2025.

“So Nice Day” by the Carrowbeg Artist Collective invites viewers into an immersive dialogue between art, ecology, and lived experience. Created by seven artists with intellectual disabilities, the exhibition weaves natural materials with personal narratives, exploring sensory awareness, sustainability, and our bond with nature. By amplifying diverse voices, CHG&S highlights the transformative power of art, fostering inclusion and deepening cultural conversations around ecology and accessibility.

Exhibition continues 20 September – 1 November 2025.

Gerard Byrne, Artist of the Baggotonia Festival 2025 presents ‘Light Falls: Ode to Baggotonia’, set in his intimate Ranelagh studio + gallery. Byrne captures Dublin’s unique light—the glow between buildings, canal shimmers, shadows folding into foliage. The show features contemplative still lifes, dreamy urbanscapes, and bold figuratives. Reflecting on Georgian streets and the city’s Bohemian soul where Beckett, Behan, and Bacon once walked, Byrne transforms everyday sights into lyrical meditations on light, memory, and place—continuing Ireland’s Impressionist legacy with contemporary insight.